Fishing with John

Made into the movie, Navigating the Heart, starring Jaclyn Smith and Tim Matheson. Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction BC Book Prize.

Book Description

This is a love story; an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only endure each other's company in alarmingly close quarters but revel in it.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland and lived an urban, sophisticated life in New York until she met and married John Daly, a commercial fisherman in British Columbia. She spent more than four years on his forty-one-foot troller, the Morekelp until his sudden death.

John Daly was an impassioned and greatly talented fisherman who was convinced that he could "think like a fish"; an amateur philosopher who worked out, and followed, an orginal set of beliefs and principles; a mystic who, after forty years of fishing, felt himself to be at one with the sea and the mountains along the British Columbia coast; a scholarly looking, high-spirited, full-blown eccentric who covered the white walls of his pilothouse with his favorite quotations in bold black letters ("Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke. O.W. Holmes")

Fishing with John established Edith Iglauer as one of BC's most popular writers. This unusual West Coast love story sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and continues to be a bestseller in paperback.